A follow up question: what are we doing now that we’re here? Let us gather for a purpose beyond “talk about stuff and things!” What gives us meaning, individually and collectively? There is a massive massive massive flood of “content” in the world; we are super saturated with it. Lots of us make it. Im not saying anyone stop, I’m saying what could we make together if we had a plan?

I think instances which are small and focused on a project could exist for a distributed team. But that sounds a lot like work. But that’s one thing that people could do: work.

I know a thing I don’t want to do: promoting, and reading promotions. I am saturated with content, and products.

But there are models for the things in between: book reading clubs (not buying books); social clubs (talking about thing but aiming at an improvement of self and society along some axis).

Personally, I’m mostly interested in what differentiates a salon in Paris a few decades ago from a public space. Curation of members, curation of topics, invitation of guests, these are the obvious outer limits. But there must have been expectation management as well. What did members hope to gain through their membership? Entertainment? Advancement? How much bowing was expected? How much free labor? I understand so little about this.

Also related: Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Could this be a Society for Improving the Art of Role-Playing Games? All games? Pushing envelopes? Feedback sessions? Criticism? I don’t want to deny the negative aspects of all these ideas (thinking of criticism and self-criticism in communist countries), but these limitations will need buy-in from a starting pool of people.

One thing that I have always enjoyed on G+ and blogs was posts that succinctly summarized an event, mostly during a session, or the setup of a one-shot, and discussed how they handled or solved it. This also extends to comments on other people’s activities (i.e. back to criticism). In the office, I’d talk about describing best practices and building a community of practice, but essentially, I think it needs some sort of scaffolding and we might as well call it a salon.

Thinking more about building a “community of practice”. What would that entail? I’d expect one consequence to be that we talk more about the things we do rather than about the things we make. So, while we are running games, playing games, designing games, writing games, we notice things and talk about them, instead of advertising the finished products we made. It’s less about the things we make but about the making of these things. (He says, trying to sound smart, haha.)

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